by Ralph Cotton
‘‘Me? Over ole Bud here?’’ Farr looked amazed at the suggestion. ‘‘Naw, hell no!’’ He felt a sheen of sweat appear across his forehead. ‘‘Like I said, there was times when I wished I’d—’’
‘‘Yeah, yeah,’’ Prew said, cutting him off. ‘‘Let me ask you this. If I give you his share of the gold to take home to his family, say to a wife, a kid? You’d see to it they got it, wouldn’t you?’’
‘‘Would I? Well, hell yes I would,’’ said Farr with great commitment. ‘‘Just as sure as a duck pulls a worm, I’d take every cent back to Kansas and . . .’’
His words trailed to a halt as he looked around, hearing the sound of stifled laughter from the men. Looking back at Prew and seeing the big pistol slide down into a saddle holster, he let out a tense breath. With a face reddened by embarrassment, he gave a sheepish grin and said, ‘‘All right, I get it—you’re funnin’ with me.’’
‘‘Yeah, I’m only joking,’’ Prew said with a smug grin. ‘‘We wouldn’t ask that much of any man. Tie their horses to a tree where el capitán and his soldiers can find them.’’ He looked all around at the men. ‘‘It would look bad for him if every one of us got away.’’ He and Cherokee turned their horses and rode back toward the trail. The circle of riders followed behind them.
The ranger waited behind a tall rugged cedar at the top of the steep trail leading up the far end of the hill line. When he’d arrived, he’d dropped the saddle from Black Pot’s back, and for the past half hour he’d let the horses graze on sparse clumps of wild grass in the shade of a small meadow. He’d cleaned and checked his guns and taken a few minutes to rest himself. Then he’d taken cover behind the tree until Russell and Kerr led their tired horses into sight.
‘‘Stop right there,’’ he called out, stepping from behind the cedar into the center of the rocky trail. The two outlaws were clearly caught off guard as they stared back along the trail behind them.
‘‘What the—!’’ Thomas Russell exclaimed, his hand going instinctively around his holstered gun butt.
Kerr’s hand did the same. But seeing the ranger standing no more than thirty feet away, his Colt already out, cocked and pointed, the two froze.
‘‘Thomas Russell and Braden Kerr,’’ the ranger said in an officious tone, holding up his wrinkled list of names in his left hand. ‘‘You are both wanted in Arizona Territory for murder, robbery, forgery, land fraud, counterfeiting of American currency, destruction of a—’’
‘‘Damn it all to hell! We know what we’ve all done!’’ said Kerr, cutting him off. He dropped his horse’s reins and took a step farther away from Russell. ‘‘Prew already had us sold out!’’
‘‘Whatever you’re thinking about doing, Cur Dog,’’ said the ranger, ‘‘you best check yourself down and give it more thought.’’
Seeing Russell take the same kind of short sidestep,
Sam said, ‘‘You too, Hemp Knot. I’m taking you both in. Lift your hands away from your guns.’’
‘‘That damn Prew,’’ said Kerr. ‘‘He did trade us both for his bay horse. I reckon I always thought he would. This has been gnawing at us ever since you sent his horse to him.’’
‘‘Tell me something, Ranger,’’ Russell asked. ‘‘How did you and Prew manage to set us up this way? How’d you know we’d come up this trail?’’
‘‘This is no setup,’’ said the ranger.
‘‘The hell,’’ said Kerr. ‘‘Everything Prew does is a setup. That bank robbery back there. The military trains. Him and el capitán sets everything up.’’
The ranger wasn’t about to tell them how wrong they were about this being a setup. Instead he said, ‘‘Raise your hands away from your guns. We’ll talk more about it along the way.’’
‘‘We ain’t going back with you, Ranger,’’ Kerr said with resolve. ‘‘We’re not outlaws no more. We came here and changed our lives. We’re respectable mercenaries here.’’
‘‘Yeah, Mexico is our home now,’’ said Russell. ‘‘Your badge ain’t worth spit here.’’ As the two spoke they put a few more inches of space between themselves. ‘‘So, you and Prew can both go to hell. Your little trading plan didn’t work.’’
‘‘Don’t do it,’’ Sam warned, seeing in their eyes and their demeanor that at any second they would make a move on him.
‘‘Now!’’ shouted Russell. No sooner had Sam warned them than their guns came up fast from their holsters.
The ranger’s first shot hit Russell in the heart before he got his gun up to fire. The ranger’s second shot hit Kerr in the center of his chest just as Kerr sent a bullet whistling past the ranger’s head.
The ranger stood for a moment in a ringing silence, watching the two men fall backward down the hillside. Russell’s body slammed into a tree. Kerr slid down the rocky trail, his fingers clawing into the dirt. The two tired horses stepped back and forth nervously, but then settled and nickered under their breath.
Kerr moaned. His fingertips scratched the ground toward his pistol, only an inch out of reach. Sam stepped down and kicked the gun away. ‘‘Damn you, Ranger,’’ Kerr rasped, looking up at him in pain. ‘‘I could have . . . lived good on this gold.’’
‘‘You made the move, Cur Dog,’’ the ranger replied. ‘‘I warned you not to.’’
‘‘Warned us . . . ha,’’ said Kerr, struggling for breath, blood pouring out of his wounded chest. ‘‘You never meant to take us in.’’ He gestured a weak hand in the direction Prew and his men had taken. ‘‘We heard the shooting. You and Prew were just . . . thinning the herd.’’
‘‘I had nothing to do with Prew,’’ said the ranger. ‘‘All I did was send him his horse and tell him I’d be coming for you and Russell. Everything else you thought about was all in your heads.’’
Looking down at Kerr’s blank eyes, Sam wasn’t sure how much the wounded man had heard before he’d died. But Kerr’s last words, ‘‘Thinning the herd,’’ had given him pause for a moment. He’d heard the two pistol shots and the repeated rifle fire earlier. Had that been Prew killing some of his own men, leaving a body or two behind for the federales just to make things look good?
The ranger thought about it as he turned to the two tired horses standing in the center of the trail. He loosened and dropped the saddlebags full of gold coins to the ground, then stripped the saddles and bridles from the horses and gave them a shove on their rumps. The horses only moved away along the hillside at a walk.
Without taking time to bury the two men, Sam dragged their bodies off into the brush. He carried both of the saddles in and tossed them over their faces. ‘‘That’s all you get today,’’ he said. Moments later he rode away back in the direction of the earlier gunfire, the bags of Mexican gold on the paint horse’s back.
On his way along the high trail he stopped once to look down and back along the flatlands toward Plaza Fuerte. Seeing the rising dust of many horses, he murmured to himself, ‘‘El capitán, no doubt.’’ Then he hastened his horses’ pace and rode on, in the direction of the earlier gunfire.
Over an hour later he stepped down where the bodies of Crenshaw and Stakes had been laid out side by side. A few feet away the dead men’s horses stood hitched to a tree. Cur Dog was right, he told himself. Prew had been thinning the herd.
Looking around, Sam led his two horses closer. Using his gloved hands he scooped half of the gold out of the mercenaries’ saddlebags and into his own. Then he swung the half-full saddlebags down from the paint horse and dropped them against the tree. He gazed back toward the distant rise of dust. Thinning the herd wasn’t a bad idea, he thought as he set about the task of loading the two bodies across their horses’ backs.
Chapter 18
Captain Luis Murella stopped a few yards back from the tree and stared blankly for a moment. To Sergeant Simon Cordova, who sat his horse beside him, Murella said in their native tongue, ‘‘Is this his idea of a joke?’’
‘‘If it is, I don’t think it’s so funny,’�
�� said Cordova. The two stared for a moment longer at the saddlebags lying against the tree. ‘‘But perhaps there has been an error of some sort,’’ he offered warily, knowing how many times he’d seen the captain fly into a rage over a thing of much less importance than gold.
‘‘No, Sergeant, there has been no error,’’ said the captain, shaking his head. ‘‘I know how the mind of this criminal works.’’ He tapped his finger to his head as he spoke. ‘‘He is leaving me a message here, telling me that he has grown much more powerful than me.’’
‘‘A message, mi capitán?’’ the sergeant asked in a meek tone of voice.
‘‘He robs the bank and leaves no bodies as he said he would,’’ the captain said, sorting it out. ‘‘And instead of waiting to split up the gold after the train robbery as we agreed to do, he leaves this miserable set of saddlebags?’’
‘‘Yes, it is most disturbing, mi capitán,’’ said the sergeant.
‘‘Most disturbing indeed,’’ the captain growled, giving him a sharp look. He gestured a nod toward the saddlebags. ‘‘Get them, bring them here. We will see how much is in them.’’ He paused and looked back down the hillside to where his men sat waiting at ease in their saddles. ‘‘But if that is half of the gold coins in the Mexico National Exchange Bank, this country of mine is in worse shape than I thought.’’
The sergeant quickly stepped his horse forward, climbed down and opened the saddlebags. Looking inside, he shook his head, closed them, shouldered them and walked back to the captain, leading his horse behind him. ‘‘El Capitán, it is as you suspected.’’ He held open the flap so the captain could see inside.
‘‘Close it and get it out of my face,’’ the captain said with bitterness and contempt.
Just feeling the captain’s smoldering fury unnerved the wiry little sergeant. He lowered the saddlebags, walked to his horse and slung them easily up behind his saddle. If Desmond Prew thought he could treat el capitán this way he was badly mistaken, Cordova told himself. When he’d finished tying down the saddlebags, he stood silently at attention.
The captain looked all around the deserted hillside, then said in a low growl, ‘‘He left none of his men for me to take back either.’’ Staring down at the sergeanthe added, ‘‘Does he think me a fool, Sergeant? Am I the kind of man who will stand still for such a double cross as this?’’
The sergeant, uncertain how to answer, simply said, ‘‘It is he who is the fool, mi capitán, not you.’’ He stiffened more even though he already stood at attention. ‘‘You have only to say the word. We will ride to Esperanza and slice off each and every important part of his body.’’
‘‘No,’’ said the captain, ‘‘we will not ride to Esperanza. Desmond Prew knows that we need him right now, to rob the train and bring us the explosives we need. That is why he thinks he can get away with this. But he is wrong. We will wait until we get the explosives. Then we will settle all accounts with him.’’
‘‘But for now, Capitán,’’ the sergeant asked, ‘‘what do we do about taking in someone for robbing the bank?’’
‘‘For now we do nothing,’’ said the captain. ‘‘But when we meet up with Prew and his men after the train robbery, we will have plenty to choose from. He grinned, his fiery temper cooling a little. ‘‘Who knows? Perhaps we will take in Prew himself.’’ He turned his horse and rode back down to join his column of troops. The nervous sergeant scrambled into his saddle and followed him.
From a thin overgrown trail atop the steep hillside, the ranger focused his telescope lens and watched the two ride down and take their positions at the head of the column. A trace of a smile came to his face when he saw the captain’s angry expression. Beside the captain the sergeant raised a gloved hand, brought the men forward into a sharp turn and headed them back toward Plaza Fuerte.
‘‘The more stones I can throw in your path, Desmond Prew, the more likely you are to trip over them,’’ the ranger said to himself. He collapsed the telescope and walked to the horses, where the bodies of Crenshaw and Stakes lay across their saddles.
He rode for the next twenty minutes along the high trail until he found the best spot to roll the bodies, saddles, tack and all down into thick brush on the rocky hillside. The two horses he turned loose the same way he had done with the others. Then he rode on, working his way back toward Esperanza to tell Jefferies what Prew and his mercenaries had been up to.
At Louisa’s small adobe house in Esperanza, Sabio and Caridad had taken lodging until such time as they could disappear once again into the hills. Sway Loden had warned them not to leave until after Prew and his men had returned. Yet, Sabio wanted to take Caridad and leave quietly, and the two of them would not be missed.
But Sabio knew that staying at Louisa’s removed the temptation of anything happening between him and Caridad, the way it had almost happened that day in his secret forest. He would not risk being alone with her under such circumstances again, he told himself, keeping a watchful eye on William Jefferies, who had come to the house once more to plead for Caridad’s forgiveness.
For the past two days, he had sat silently by and watched and listened to Jefferies try to make Caridad understand why he’d rejoined Prew’s men. But Caridad would have none of it. ‘‘When you left with the ranger, you said you were going across the border,’’ she replied, ‘‘and that you would return for me someday. You said you wanted nothing more to do with these kind of men.’’ She looked at him with deep hurt showing in her dark eyes. ‘‘You lied to me.’’
‘‘Yes, and I am sorry,’’ said Jefferies. He did not tell them that he’d come to town with the ranger, or what he and the ranger had planned to do. The less they knew about their plan, the better, he thought. ‘‘Caridad, I had to come back here, just for a little while,’’ he continued. ‘‘I came back because I was worried about you. Won’t you please believe me?’’ Jefferies knew how weak it sounded, yet he was unable to tell her why he’d been here when she and Sabio rode in with Cherokee Jake Slattery and the other two mercenaries.
‘‘How could you come here for me, when you knew that Sabio and I were going to stay at the old mission?’’ she asked.
She had him there, Jefferies thought, knowing he could take it no further without endangering her. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust her. It was that he didn’t want her knowing something that would bring her harm if Prew ever found out about it.
When he could offer no explanation, she gave him a disappointed look and said, ‘‘That is what I thought.’’ Then she turned and walked out the back door to where Louisa stirred a simmering pot of goat stew over a small stone chimenea.
Turning toward Sabio as Caridad stepped into the backyard, Jefferies said, ‘‘I think it’s time for you and me to have ourselves a talk. I think you understand why I walked out into the street when I saw the two of you ride into town.’’
‘‘Yes, I understood right away,’’ Sabio admitted. He stood up from his straight-backed chair and picked up a clay pitcher of cool wine. He walked over to the table where Jefferies sat and poured a cupful for the young American.
‘‘Then why won’t you talk to her, let her know that I’m not lying?’’
‘‘Why have I not done that?’’ Sabio considered. ‘‘I will tell you why I have not.’’ Having come to a decision regarding Caridad, Sabio sighed deeply in his resolve and said, ‘‘I have remained silent all this time because I love that one very much.’’
‘‘You mean . . . ?’’ Jefferies let his words trail off.
‘‘No,’’ Sabio said. ‘‘Not in that way.’’ He sat down across the table from Jefferies, poured himself a cup of wine and said, ‘‘But let me tell you a story that will help you understand how things are with me and with my precious Caridad.’’
Jefferies watched him bow his bald head for a moment as if in prayer. When Sabio looked up, a tiny bud of a tear lay in the corner of his eye. ‘‘When I was a young man here in Esperanza, I fell in love with a beautiful girl w
hose name I still forbid myself to speak aloud. But throughout my life I have been endowed with both a blessing and a curse. My blessing has been this gift of power which you have witnessed.’’ He looked Jefferies in the eye. ‘‘You do believe in such a thing as a spiritual gift, do you not?’’
‘‘I’ve had reservations in the past,’’ said Jefferies, ‘‘but I won’t discount such a thing. I came to you bleeding and you stopped it. I can’t say how—I can only say you did.’’
Sabio nodded and continued. ‘‘It was because of that power that the priests took me in and made me one of them. They wanted people to witness my power and think it came from the holy mother church. But it did not. It came directly from God, from God’s hand to mine, with no one between. Do you understand me?’’
‘‘Yes, I believe I do,’’ said Jefferies. ‘‘If this power came from God, you didn’t want anyone or anything else claiming to be the source of it?’’
‘‘Yes, you do understand,’’ Sabio said, seeming a bit surprised at the young American’s insightfulness.
Jefferies only sipped his wine and listened.
‘‘That was my gift,’’ said Sabio. ‘‘And even my gift was not an easy thing to bear.’’ He gave a thin sardonic grin and said, ‘‘But wait until you hear about my curse.’’
Jefferies nodded and looked deep into Sabio’s dark eyes as he continued.
‘‘My curse has been an unrelenting carnal desire for women,’’ Sabio said bluntly. ‘‘Throughout my life I have never been able to satisfy my hunger for them. It is a terrible affliction, one that has cost me everything over the years. And now it seems, it is taking my gift from me, as I should have known it would.’’
Jefferies only stared at him silently, not knowing what to say.
‘‘The young woman I loved?’’ Sabio said. ‘‘I refused to allow myself to hurt her as I knew I would someday. So I gave in to the leaders of the church and joined their brotherhood, thinking that God in his mercy would take this craving from me, or at least give me the strength to overcome it. Because how could a man be given such a gift as this and yet be plagued by such a curse?’’ He asked Jefferies in a way that pleaded for an answer; yet, clearly, he knew no answer was forthcoming. ‘‘Why does God do such things as this?’’ he said, shaking his bald head sadly.